


Phlegethon

by icarus_chained



Series: Black And Gold - Prohibition AU [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Noir, Dark, Gen, Kidnapping, Murder, Organized Crime, Prohibition, Racism, Racist Language, Revenge, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-10 01:39:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/460810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James Rhodes pulls Tony out a river next to a burning warehouse in north Jersey, and Tony takes the first steps on the road to power and vengeance.</p>
<p>Part one of the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/series/22640">Prohibition AU</a>, prequel to Vision in Green/Vision in Blue. Tony's 'start of darkness', as it were.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Phlegethon

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for, among other things, period-appropriate racial views (by which I mean blatant racism), and language. Also, violence, murder and vengeance. And perhaps incredibly shaky-to-non-existant knowledge of 1920s New York. Heh.
> 
> The title is from the Greek River of Fire, Phlegethon, which circled Hades opposite the River Styx. And I was thinking something like the [Harlem Hellfighters](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/369th_Infantry_Regiment_\(United_States\)) for Fury's/Rhodey's war experience, though I'm uncertain how plausible that is (and yes, I know Rhodey was born in Phillie, not NY, but for the sake of the AU ...).

It was just his luck, to be the one to find the not-so-dead body. His luck, and Tony's too, Rhodey thought later. If it hadn't been him ...

The warehouse lit up the sky on the far bank, the kind of thoroughly-fired he hadn't seen since the war. In fact, he'd have sworn diamonds to dollars it was a professional job. But not theirs. They'd seen the glow over the rise well before they'd hit the area.

Fury was, well, furious. And more than a little worried, Rhodey thought. Whoever the hell had got there before them, they knew what they were doing. And by all information, there'd been a full shipment of arms in that munitions store/factory before it went up, and no way to know whether they'd been 'rescued' beforehand, and were now in the kind of hands that could pull off a fire like this.

All in all, not the best news the boss could have gotten. Especially not on top of the four attacks over the past fifteen days.

Someone hadn't gotten the memo that interlopers weren't welcome in Harlem, these days.

Hence Rhodey trawling the north bank, looking for signs that someone had gotten a boat out before or after the warehouse went up. And hence him stumbling across what was simultaneously the best and worst news he'd had all night.

The best because it _probably_ meant those guns hadn't gone any damn where. And the worst, because that meant Rhodey would have to drag his water-logged, injured, and only partially conscious find over to Fury to explain.

"I heard tell you were dead," he grunted, as he pulled the vaguely struggling figure up the bank onto more solid ground, ignoring the bitten-off whimper with only a faint flinch of his own. "Sure show up in some unlikely places, Stark."

The whimper turned into a gravelled chuckle, pained and exhausted. "And I heard tell you were in the army," the businessman rasped, around the hitch of breath as Rhodey pulled them to a stop, and let the man slump into his lap. "We running armed exercises in north Jersey, now?"

Rhodey chuckled. For a second, at least, before stopping when Tony gasped softly at the movement. "War's been over a few years, Tony," Rhodey said, quietly. "Had to find me some other employment." A bitter little grin. "Turns out white folk ain't so happy about havin' a black man around who knows how to kill people. I've been down in Harlem."

Tony went very still, at that, and Rhodey felt his heart slow, felt danger curl under his breast. That kind of stillness, it meant knowledge.

"... Fury?" Tony asked, carefully. The fires of the warehouse painting his sweating, damp skin bronze, the livid streaks and marks under his vest and along his arms like tiger stripes painted over it. Yeah. Ain't no guns got outta that store. Rhodey knew that. Because someone had set that blaze professional-like, and he was sitting on a riverbank with a fucking Stark in his arms. He'd seen Stark munitions go up, over in France. He knew what he was looking at. 

And if that was the case, then Tony was going to have to talk to Fury about it. And Rhodey ... was going to have to bring him there.

"Yeah," Rhodey murmured, quietly. "Yeah, Tony. We're going to have to talk a little about that."

Tony laughed. His wet head tucked into Rhodey's chest, his breath rattling after the recently-expelled water. He laughed, low and mirthless. "You have _no idea_ ," he murmured, waiting for the tremors to subside. "It's good to see you, Rhodey. Been awhile, ain't it?"

"Been a long while," Rhodey agreed, softly, resisting the urge to brush Tony's hair back so he could see his face. "And I don't think you're gonna like me so much in a minute. You injured? You think you can stand?"

He didn’t like Tony’s laugh, at that. Didn’t like it at all. Not even mirthless. He’d heard soldiers laugh like that. Usually before they did something … unwise.

“You ain’t got no idea what I can do,” Tony murmured, his head still bowed. “Turns out, neither did I. Fancy that, huh?” He raised his head, while Rhodey carefully didn’t answer, and there was too much length to his stare for Rhodey’s comfort. Tony held up a hand. “Give me a hand up, buddy, and lets go see Nicholas Fury, hmm?”

And suddenly, Rhodey wasn’t at all sure that was wise, but … Well. Like he said. The best and worst news he’d had all night.

Tony staggered, getting to his feet, leaned pretty heavily on Rhodey. And flinched, some, when Rhodey put his hand in the wrong place across his shoulders. So. Hurt some, definitely. He didn’t seem to be bleeding any, when Rhodey gave him a quick once-over. The vest, what was left of it, was white, and there was grease or something like it smeared around it, but no blood that Rhodey could see. Not that the light was the best, mind. Those tiger stripes, though. They looked like burns.

“You have been through the wars, ain’t you,” he said, softly, and Tony grinned at him. A dark crease in his face, and startlingly bright teeth.

“And I ain’t out yet,” the man agreed, straightening carefully and letting Rhodey take some of his weight. “Fortunately, I might know a thing or two that could make your boss a bit more cheerful.” He slanted his grin sideways. “Think that might help my case any?”

Rhodey shook his head, with a faint grin of his own. “How about you and me, we go see, hmm?” he said, and carefully slid his arm around Tony’s waist, and Tony’s over his own shoulders. 

This was going to be a long, _long_ walk, he thought.

He wasn’t wrong, either. By the time they’d made it back to the small bridge on the road onto the site, Tony was wheezing alarmingly, and Rhodey wasn’t completely sure the man was fully with him. He’d stumbled back to full, panicked awareness a couple of times, and muttered something, a name. And it hadn’t been Rhodey’s.

But when he saw the cluster of people around Fury on the stamped ground in the headlights of the cars, he straightened up. Like he had a rod through his spine, his shoulders going back and chin coming up. A light, casual smile fixing itself to his face.

When they’d been teenagers, those few times they’d been allowed to meet, those few more Tony’d arranged to sneak out, Rhodey’d seen him do that. Seen him put on the face, put on the swagger. Even back then, he’d thought it pretty close to a damn magic trick.

Aw hell. Lets get this thing done.

“Boss!” he called, across the throng and the light. “Got a survivor over here!”

Beside him, Tony smiled faintly. “Nice of you not to say ‘prisoner’,” he murmured, _sotto voce_. “Appreciate it, buddy.”

“Just shut up and make with the good info, alright?” Rhodey hissed back, and shook his head at Tony’s quiet laugh.

“Rhodes!” Fury strode over, flanked by Maria, a dark, compact woman with a scowl like thunder, and Natasha, a red-headed Russian beauty who Rhodey knew for a damn fact could gut a man soon as look at him. Once upon a time, there’d been people who thought Fury was weak, or lust-addled, having two women as his 2IC and his top enforcer, respectively. And the latter a foreigner, on top of it. After approximately one demonstration, pretty much all of them had shut their yaps. “What the fuck we got, then?”

“You got Tony fucking Stark, is what you got,” Tony cut in, before Rhodey could even open his mouth. His voice warm and faintly amused, not even the faintest twinge of apprehension. Goddamn magic act, Rhodey was telling you. Tony stepped one pace forward of Rhodey, hands spread out at his sides, casual and non-confrontational, and smiled right into Fury’s oncoming glare. “Happy Christmas, hmm?”

Fury … didn’t hit him. Rhodey quietly thanked about sixteen saints for that little blessing. Fury pulled up in front of him, scowling to beat out Maria, hands curled into light fists as he looked at the man. But he didn’t hit him.

“Tony Stark?” Fury repeated. “Industrialist Tony Stark? The one who was kidnapped or murdered three months ago?”

Tony’s grin slipped a little. “Kidnapped, definitely,” he agreed. “They only murdered me a little bit. I got better.” And then, quieter: “More or less.”

Fury’s eyebrows shot up, then came down again in a narrow, suspicious scowl. “And who,” he murmured, lightly and not at all threateningly, “are _they_? Hmm?”

Tony’s face … shifted. Rhodey wasn’t sure how to describe it, wasn’t sure what to make of it, precisely, but Natasha shifted immediately, angled herself instantly towards the man. One hand dropping to her waist, where the pocket of her dress opened onto a small arsenal strapped to her thigh. And you did _not_ want to know how Rhodey’d found that one out.

“I can’t tell you who hired them,” Tony said, and there was an edge to it that Rhodey’d never heard in the man before. “Alright, that’s not quite true. Better say, I _won’t_ tell you who hired them. That’s for me to sort out.” His grin widened as Fury’s face darkened, a flash of teeth in the light of a burning building. “But I can tell you some other things. If you’re interested?”

Rhodey, very carefully, didn’t knock the man’s block off himself. Obviously, in the decade since he’d last seen the man, Tony Stark hadn’t learned sense _at all_.

Fury didn’t speak, for a moment. Didn’t say a damn thing. But he moved forward. Stepped in close, a dark, solid figure in the glare of the headlamps, right up into Tony’s face. Tony, barely on his feet, still shaking slightly from almost having burned and drowned in short order, pale and injured and _thick-headed_ , had never looked smaller than he did now.

But Tony, being Tony, didn’t back down. And for some reason, that sparked a strange little curl of remembered warmth, in Rhodey.

“You know,” Fury said, quietly, almost musingly, “I don’t think you’re a stupid man, Stark.” A small smile, or something pretending to be one. “Despite current evidence to the contrary.” He tilted his head, looked down at the man before him. “You do know where you are? And who I am?” 

Tony flashed his teeth. “Sure do,” he said, quietly. “Which oughta be strange, don’t you think? For a man of my social circle to know who you are. And what you do, Mr Fury. I know a few things about that, too.” A quirk of his lips. “Don’t you think that’s strange?”

Fury smiled coldly. “Oh, I’m sure you’re about to fill me in on how it’s possible,” he murmured, and it was dangerous, yes, but for some reason he looked like he’d relaxed. Eased back a bit out of Tony’s space. Rhodey, frowning, exchanged a quick glance with Maria, Natasha. 

That was almost never good.

Tony smiled, a bright little thing that made absolutely no change to his eyes. “Sure am,” he nodded. And then faltered, gestured vaguely with one hand towards the cars. “Though … I’m having one helluva day. You think we could have this conversation sitting down, maybe?”

Rhodey was stepping forward before Fury ever moved. Whether the boss was going to say yes or no. He stepped up behind Tony, out to the side so Tony could see him coming, and touched his hand questioningly to the back of the man’s shoulder. Tony only barely flinched. And Fury only barely raised an eyebrow.

“You gonna fall down on me?” Rhodey asked him, quietly, carefully not looking at Fury, or wondering what the hell the man would think. Focusing, instead, on a man who’d been a friend, once upon a time.

Tony slumped. A bare increment, just a tiny loosening of his spine, curving back into Rhodey’s hand. “Nope,” he said, smiling brightly, and Rhodey doubted there was a single person there who bought it. “But something to lean against would not go astray, right now.”

Rhodey looked to Fury. Who looked back at him, forehead wrinkled in a thoughtful, considering frown, dark eyes measuring Rhodey from stem to stern.

“We’ll take my car,” the man said, at last. Watching the pair of them thoughtfully. Boy oh boy, was Rhodey gonna pay for this one.

But hey. He still owed Stark a thing or two.

“Your name is Nicholas Fury,” Tony started, without preamble, the second he was propped against the wing of Fury’s Ford. “You run something like 70% of the gambling racket in central Harlem. You’ve a decent-sized militia available, a number of them ex-military. You’re a self-made businessman, and you seem to be making your own money, with no higher backing that anyone can see.” He smiled, a narrow sliver. “And you’ve also got a problem. Someone’s been running raids on your turf. Hitting you hard. You’ve lost people, drawn the attention of the cops, and you’ve lost at least two of your permanent clubs to fire and gun damage in the last few months. Someone wants you gone. Right so far?”

They’d all stiffened, over the course of that little recitation. Yeah. Right so far.

Tony didn’t smirk. By a hair, Rhodey suspected, but he didn’t. “I don’t know specifically who they are. They didn’t make all that much effort to enlighten me. But I can tell you three locations, two in north Jersey, one in New York, where they’ve been storing and moving munitions. And I can tell you the next three raids they had planned against you. Which, I think, should be enough for you to do most of the finding out for yourself?”

He looked confident. He was projecting confidence like it was going outta style, his arms crossed casually, leaning languidly against the wing. If it weren’t for the faint tremble at the corner of his mouth, and the way he was so very, very still, Rhodey would never have known he was scared shitless. And in the lights off the lamps, the spiralling burns up his forearms, and in strangely regular lines across his back and shoulders, were all the more livid. Like he’d been wearing some kinda fire-suit, and the heat had gotten in through the cracks.

Fury paused, for a long minute. The kind of silence that made men worry, that made men break. Tony, under his scrutiny, didn’t flinch.

“And in return?” Fury asked, eventually, and Rhodey blinked a little bit, because it was soft, and quiet, and strangely gentle. “What would you want for this bounty of information, Stark?”

Tony looked away, tilted his face to stare out over the now-smouldering remains of the warehouse, an edge of that far-too-long stare creeping back in, and something more, too. Something dark, and cold as ice.

“A lift back to New York,” he said, at last, and his voice shook, a little. “A ride to New York, where you let me go once we get there.” He smiled, a tiny quirk of his lips, cynical and amused. “A gun. Something … Something that will put a very nice hole in someone.” He looked back, and Rhodey almost wished he hadn’t, for a second. Until whatever that look was faded, and the businessman’s smile slid back over it like a particularly lethal magic trick. “And then … maybe, when we’ve both taken care of our respective businesses … We could meet? You and me?” That twitch of a smile. “Providing I live, I think we could do some business, you and I.”

Fury looked at him, steadily, for a long second. And then: “The man who hired them?” he asked, almost idly. Tony’s smile flashed to that deadly thing, for a second, came back bleaker. 

“Got me a debt to pay,” he agreed, very quietly. “Attempted murder, three months of slavery, the odd bit of torture thrown in for fun.” His grin slid sideways on his face. He looked fucking awful. “I don’t take betrayal all that well.”

And there, right there, Rhodey twigged. There, Rhodey realised who the fuck Tony had to be talking about, the only fucking person it could be. He sucked in a breath, audible, visible shock, and all four of them turned to look at him. It was Tony he was looking at, though. The way his smile flickered out at the knowledge in Rhodey’s eyes, something raw and pained and furious, shaking in pain, roaring up beneath it.

“ _Jesus_ ,” Rhodey whispered, low and vehement. “Shit, Tony.”

“I’m gonna get him, James,” Tony whispered, and it shook with fury, and something more. “I’m gonna split him apart, and take everything he owned, and break everyone who helped him. I’m going to _take_ him.” A flicker, a smile. “You don’t want to be there when I do. You don’t want to get in the way. Right?”

“He’s the one been funding the raids on our turf,” Fury cut in, lightly. An idle note. “Might be we’d have some interest in that.”

The look Tony shot him woulda killed a lesser man. Hell, it made a decent shot at _this_ one. Fury simply looked back, unperturbed. 

“Sir,” Rhodey said. The kind of quiet that people listened to. Even ex-sergeants. “Not this, sir. It’s private.” A twist of his mouth, his gaze darting to Tony for a second, back to Fury. “It’s family, sir. You don’t take that from a man.”

Fury studied him for a minute. Him and Tony both, weighing them up. Reading, Rhodey thought, the last two decades of his life off him. He bore it silently, staring straight back. It’d been more than a decade, since he’d last seen Tony. But he owed the man. He’d been friends with the man.

And when a man’d been betrayed like Tony just had, Rhodey didn’t care. You didn’t take that vengeance from him. Whatever else you did. Not that.

“Hmm,” Fury murmured, scowling thoughtfully at them. And then: “We got a doctor, of sorts, back with Dugan and the crew. You’ll get looked over first, Stark.” He shook his head, talked right over Tony’s protests. “I don’t give a fuck. I don’t send men out to fight looking like they’re half-dead ‘less I’ve got no other choice. You get looked over. You get a gun. And then …” He smiled, and it’d’ve looked about right on a tiger. “Then you go take care of your business, and we’ll take care of ours. And when we’re done …”

He shook his head, fished a matchbook out of his pocket. Held it out to Tony, who, after a second of looking at it like it might bite him, reached out and took it hesitantly.

“When we’re done,” Fury finished, “you look me up there.” He smirked, darkly. “You think we can do business, Stark? One of the upstate boys and a crew of Harlem niggers?”

Tony, blinking slightly, just nodded. Rallied himself a little, tipped his head at Rhodey. “Never bothered me before,” he said. Challenged, really. Fury looked at Rhodey again. Measuring. Rhodey shook his head. Explain later. Work now. Fury nodded faintly.

“Well then,” said the king of central Harlem. “Come see us, once you’re done. We’ll talk business. Maybe a few other things.” He sobered, a little. “And Stark? You want my advice, with your little problem?”

Tony looked at him, and the things Rhodey saw swarming behind his eyes, they gave him the chills. Natasha, beside him, was doing her best impression of a sphinx.

“Make a point,” Fury said, low and quiet. “Not just to him. To _everyone_. Make a statement, Stark, and let people know what the hell it’s gonna cost them, to mess with you.” He paused, looked Tony over. The battered, singed vest, the lines of burns, the thing in his eyes that reflected the smouldering remains of his prison over the rise. “If you’re gonna get into this game … You gotta make sure you can handle the rules.”

Tony, though, Tony tilted his head. Looked up at Fury with a smile that made Rhodey remember, made it flash, what Tony’d said on the riverbank, slurred in Rhodey’s arms. _You ain’t got no idea what I can do,_ he’d said. _Turns out, neither did I_.

“No, I don’t,” Tony said softly. “I don’t gotta learn anybody’s rules.” He flashed teeth, bright, bright white in that singed face, beneath those dark eyes. “I’m gonna _make_ some, instead.”

“... Yeah,” Fury said, watching him carefully. “I can see that, Stark. I can see it.”

And Rhodey wondered, vaguely, if Fury wished as strongly as he did that he couldn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> There are about 12 or so stories planned for this verse (including the two already written). An overview of the tentative masterlist for the verse can be found [here](http://icarus-chained.livejournal.com/350555.html) on my LJ.


End file.
